Missed my coverage of Day 1 & Day 2 – read those first!

The third and final day of SMX kicked off with a session Moderated by KeyRelevance’s own Christine Churchill.  Beyond The Google AdWords Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Tactics covered ways to find keywords that don’t appear in the AdWords free tool.

My wifi was down for most of this session (seriously -how do we function without wifi at these things?  We don’t) but I did capture a few interesting tidbits at the end from Shawn Livengood (@slivengood) and Suren Ter-Saakov  (@seoquaketeam) He shared some great pieces of info centered around international keyword research – specifically in cases where you don’t speak the languages.

From Shawn Livengood

• Have a conversation with a native speaker centered around what words actually mean and also regional translations of difficult words
• Cultural differences can be huge.  Eg – in the US “Shipping” means sending a box via UPS or FedEx – in the UK “Shipping” means sendings something on a boat.
• He finds little value in a bulk list of keywords in a foreign language received from an agency, more value in talking with the person who does the research
• Use image search in Google for the country in question to find the meaning of words you don’t recognize.

From Suren Ter-Saakov

• Look at the number of pages ranking versus the number of monthly ueries to get an idea of how hard it would be to rank for a term – ie – lots of pages ranking for a term that gets few searches, not so easy to rank, vice versa would make ranking much easier.
• “Lamborghini” has slightly less volume of searches than “kia” but there are far fewer Lamborghinis are made or sold.  Popular keywords don’t necessarily mean revenue
• Compare the keywords that your competitors are bidding on and look for the terms that only 5 of 10 competitors bid on – this is an opportunity
• Not every query is profitable, some are nonsensical or informational queries and you don’t need to bid on them, you’ll never see a return.
• Ask a client’s customer support team to create your ads, they speak the language and know what callers/customers are looking for

@PatriciaHursh of Smart Search Marketing shared this great bit:

• Have different measurements for different keyword goals – branded target keywords should have different metric goals than high-competition keywords

After I attended the Advanced keyword research panel, Q&A moderated a great panel on building killer content with Heather Lloyd-Martin, David Waterman & Will Duderstadt.  My own coverage is a bit light on this panel as I was watching the queue and taking questions from the audience.  Check out all of the Twitter Coverage!

This was my last session at SMX East, I was off to Laguardia to board an extremely bumpy flight out of there, but I enjoyed meeting a bunch of new folks, and reuniting with some I already knew.  Be sure to tune into the KeyRelevance blog in a week or so while I liveblog from Pubcon Las Vegas!